Imagine you get home from work today and something’s broken. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Something’s up with the car, or the fridge isn’t actually keeping anything cold, or maybe the ceiling’s leaking. Regardless, something needs sorting and it’s going to cost you £500. Do you reckon you’d…Read more…
McDonald’s workers’ requests are reasonable – they deserve to be met
We are not asking for a lot. We are asking to be treated with respect, have guaranteed hours, and to be paid a decent living wage of £10 that we can afford to live on. It’s all very reasonable when you actually think about it. These are the words of Lewis Baker, one of the…
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Enough about highly-paid footballers, let’s focus on the low-paid workers
The transfer window finally came to a close last Thursday. As ever, it was charactertised by a lot of headlines about wages. At the TUC, we’re a fan of wages being in the news – but in Premier League football, it’s not low wages that are making headlines. Real wages have been falling for…Read more…
Let’s help families achieve the balance that works for them
Working Families and workplace solutions expert Bright Horizons track key issues for working parents in our annual Modern Families Index. In 2016, we highlighted how millennial parents are feeling at work (prone to burn out and desperate for a better work-life balance); and in 2017 we warned the…Read more…
3 employment rights that aren’t working for young mums and dads. And 2 rights that they should have.
Today we’re publishing the findings from our research with over 1,000 young mums and dads. We wanted to know what young mums and dads thought about the workplace rights which are supposed to help them manage their childcare. We asked them: If they are aware of three key existing employment rights…Read more…
Why on earth have social care workers not been getting the National Minimum Wage?
Enforcement of the NMW for sleep-ins temporarily suspended in social care Last month the government announced it was waiving historic financial penalties and temporarily suspending enforcement of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) for workers required to ‘sleep-in’ on their employer’s premises…Read more…
Why we should still be worried about zero-hours contracts
The ONS release on the number of zero-hours contracts yesterday showed that there has a been a fall of 20,000 over the year. This is the first fall we have seen in the data series. However, at 2%, this is a drop in the ocean. There are still around 900,000 of these controversial contracts. Numbers…Read more…
After another lost decade, it’s time to fix the UK’s broken skills system
Workers have suffered from a lost decade of wage growth. While the jobs recovery has been strong, the wage recovery has been agonisingly slow. Wages in 2016 were still 4% lower in real terms than they were a decade before, and they are falling again. Britain’s dreadful performance on…Read more…
We need a voice at work – but was the Taylor Review listening?
In our evidence to the Taylor Review, the TUC and trade unions argued that strengthening workers’ rights to voice in the workplace is key to addressing insecurity and exploitation at work. So was the Taylor Review listening? “The Review believes that for work to be fair and decent, workers must…Read more…
A right to request fixed hours is no right at all
The Taylor Review wants those on zero hours contracts to have a legal right to request a contract that guarantees hours that better reflect the actual hours they work. A right to request fixed hours, however, is no right at all. It’s more of a vague hope. To see why, we just need to…Read more…
Our enforcement system isn’t working. What’s the Taylor Review going to do about it?
The Taylor Review includes a section on “fairer enforcement”, which concludes with the statement: “The two-tier enforcement framework in the UK works”. No it doesn’t. Two things immediately spring to mind that show this statement isn’t true: Employment tribunal fees price people out of justice….Read more…
5 reasons why a “dependent contractor” test is a bad idea
One of the more curious suggestions to emerge from the Taylor Review is the proposal to replace the concept of “worker” in employment law with that of “dependent contractor”. This proposal might sound interesting, but here’s 5 reasons why it may not be such a good idea. All working people…Read more…
Follow the money: How do the tax and social security proposals in the Taylor Review measure up?
The rise of insecure work has had real consequences for both personal budgets and the national exchequer. The lower earnings and lower tax paid by the self-employed and those on zero hours contracts means the rise in insecure work has come with a £5bn price tag for the exchequer. But the cost of…Read more…
The Taylor Review – should the Low Pay Commission be given more to do?
The Taylor review of modern working practices contains some important recommendations on low pay, the National Minimum Wage (NMW) and the Low Pay Commission (LPC). Taylor’s broad aim of empowering the LPC to do more to promote decent work is the right one, so the short answer to the question in the…Read more…
The Taylor review: the yay, the meh, and the no way
The Taylor review is finally here, along with a pretty large sense of anti-climax. This isn’t the game changer those in insecure work were looking for. In assessing what it means, we’ve tried to keep in mind the people who told us about their experience of insecure work, of shifts being cancelled…Read more…
The Taylor Review isn’t the ‘game-changer’ that gig economy workers need
I worry that many gig economy employers will be breathing a sigh of relief this morning. The Taylor Review into modern employment practices publishes today. And from what we’ve seen, it’s not the game-changer needed to end insecurity and exploitation at work. We’d welcome any nuggets of good news….Read more…
The Taylor Review: What do we know so far?
There’s been a flurry of pre-briefing over the weekend on the Taylor report. We’ve rounded up what we know so far, and added our thoughts on what that would mean for the 3.2 million people in insecure work. Of course we’ll have to wait till the actual report is published tomorrow to give our…Read more…
The Taylor review: what should it say?
The long-awaited Taylor Review into “modern employment” practices is just days away from publication. It’s been talked up a great deal by ministers and cited numerous times by the Prime Minister, so it’s fair to say that expectations are high. Matthew deserves credit for his willingness to…Read more…
How too much insecurity at work is bad for business
New research from Learning and Work Institute shows that insecure work grew between 2011 and 2016 and may be reducing productivity growth. Insecure work is one of the topics of our time. For some, increased flexibility over work can be a real benefit. …Read more…
#InsecureWork in modern day Britain: Precarious by name, precarious by nature
Low pay; zero-hours contracts; the gig economy; the introduction of employment tribunal fees. We are living in an age in which the agency, rights and dignity of a significant part of Britain’s workforce are being stripped away. Just last week, we had headlines telling us that the plight of today’s…Read more…